shaver

Tyla was apparently offended by my proportionate response entry below, for which I am therefore compelled to apologize. I certainly didn’t intend to insinuate that you were not replete with the very essence of hospitality, merely that you got a little more freaked out by the idea of people coming by in the afternoon without explicit warning than I think was warranted. That was a crappy sentence, but I am so not spending any more time on this issue, and that includes editing.

I made more pieces of recovery work today, and wrote tests for them. I got a little excited about the whole test thing, and dumped some bugs on our intrepid QA lead about getting even more tests working.

Another in-class driving lesson today, and it was everything I had feared. The topic of this lesson was dealing with adverse conditions, including driver impairment, which of course requires amateurish video telling us all about how wonderful some random victim of drunk driving was. One of the videos was about — though we didn’t learn this until after the segment ended and the instructor told us — someone who was hit by a car while playing chicken. I’m not sure what the lesson for us is there, unless the lessons are supposed to cover a much broader range of common sense than I had previously suspected. Maybe we’re supposed to take away the fact that people can do crazy things on highways, but in that case it might have been good to a) hear from the driver, and not just the girl’s classmates, and b) tell us that in the video. Lunacy. I think the whole notion that anyone paying a thousand dollars to learn to drive, in the year 2003, needs to be told that drinking and driving can kill people belies a fundamental lack of respect for the customer’s time. I’m sure there’s some provincial requirement that we be shown a certain number of tragic yearbook photos, though, so it’s probably not all YD’s fault.

We did spend some time on the notion of personal responsibility, though, which was unexpected and rather refreshing. Weather doesn’t make cars go out of control, and cars don’t cause cars to go out of control: inappropriate driving causes cars to go out of control. It is very difficult to end up killing yourself or someone else in a parked car, so make sure you know what you’re doing, and be very conservative about your choices, if you decide to take a large, heavy, dangerous vehicle out of that quiescent state. (If I ever end up in an accident and blame the weather or the car — even tire blowouts — please come to my house and read me this entry until I regain my senses. Thank you.)

At least all the silly “hey kids, don’t drink and drive” video time gave me a chance to design some solutions to the recovery problems that I came across today. Of course, I could have done that at home, without paying someone for the pleasure, but I’m not bitter or anything.